Help:IPA/Catalan

It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Catalan in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions that link here; do not change any symbol or its value without establishing consensus on the talk page first.

Two Catalan varieties are covered here: Standard Catalan (C)—based in Central Catalonia, encompassing most Eastern Catalan features—and Standard Valencian (V)—based in Southern Valencia, encompassing most Western Catalan features. Standard Catalan is preferred on Wikipedia because it is the most prestigious and neutral variety. However, wherever clearly more relevant (for instance, in the case of a Valencian artist), Standard Valencian pronunciation should be transcribed instead.

^ abCatalan orthography distinguishes between ⟨ll⟩ (representing /ʎ/) and ⟨l·l⟩ (representing a geminated/lː/). In regular speech gemination of ⟨l·l⟩ is ignored altogether. Some dialects as well as young speakers can merge /ʎ/ with the glide [j] in a process similar to Spanish yeísmo.

^ abThe rhotic consonants ⟨r⟩ /ɾ/ and ⟨rr⟩ /r/ only contrast between vowels. Otherwise, they are in complementary distribution as ⟨r⟩ with [r] occurring word-initially, after /l/, /n/, and /s/, and in compounds; and [ɾ] after hard plosives, the soft spirants [β, ð, ɣ], and /f/. Syllable-final /ɾ/ varies according to dialect, emphasis, morpheme and the following sound. In all Catalan dialects, except most of Valencian, /ɾ/ is lost in coda position in suffixes of nouns and adjectives denoting the masculine singular and in the infinitive suffixes of verbs, except when the following morpheme begins with a vowel, although this may vary (Carbonell & Llisterri (1999:63–64), Wheeler (2005:24–25)).

^Many words that have /ɛ/ in Standard Catalan have /e/ in Standard Valencian. The latter is the historical pronunciation.

^ abIn Standard Catalan, unstressed [e] and [o] appear only in some words such as ídem[ˈidem], oceans[useˈans], ego[ˈeɣo] and mouré[mowˈɾe]. In other cases, they merge with [ə] and [u] (Wheeler (2005:61–72)).

Western Catalan: [ɛ, e] merge to [e] and [ɔ, o] merge to [o]. Exceptionally there are some cases where unstressed ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩ may merge with [a] and [u] respectively (Carbonell & Llisterri (1999:62–63), Wheeler (2005:52–77)).

Bibliography

Carbonell, Joan F.; Llisterri, Joaquim (1999), "Catalan", Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61–65, ISBN978-0-521-63751-0